“Why Am I Black?” Gendering Hip-Hop, and Translocal Solidarities in Dubai

Abstract

What happens when two or more distinctive ways of being, understanding, and living blackness operate side-by-side in the same space and time? What new truths and narratives emerge when distinctive histories of migration and identity converge by the way of extended dialogues between women involved in global hip-hop culture and politics? To answer these questions, I first develop a black feminist ethnographic methodology grounded in a transversal understanding of black feminism and hip-hop politics. Using ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with eight black-identified “third culture” Afro-Arab women in Dubai, UAE, I argue that hip-hop continues to provide an important point of encounter to negotiate local-to-local connections in ways that undermine the national boundaries erected by states and reinforced through racializing practices that are often expressed through the cultural logics of capitalist heteropatriarchy.

Conclusion

Hip-hop provides the field of engagement for personal sharing, and truth-telling about the intricacies and intimacies of blackness in a globalized world. It is a space in which we can engage and flow across our differences with passion, respect, and admiration. Hip-hop was the cipher in which a transversal politics was enacted: it was the common discourse in which we gave voice to histories and realities on our own terms without fear of condemnation or judgment—with attention paid to questions of justice, representation, recognition, and solidarity. Hip-hop, as Paul Gilroy (2005) writes, provided the “spirit of connection…that can be recycled and employed to transform our understanding of how translocal solidarity can work so that we are more informed, more sensitive, less intimidated, and more likely to act (p. 79).”

In Dubai, hip-hop is used as a space to wrestle the spiritual fruit of Islam from the dogmas of state patriarchy, and to contend with the contemporary challenges of motherhood in the hyper-material, fast-paced, and high-stress digital age. Artists like Malikah, Rafiyah, and Sara, and many others, have created a political and cultural space within hip-hop where the voices, perspectives, interests, and experiences of contemporary Middle-Eastern women can redefine the parameters of cultural resistance in places that deny the very existence of race. All women we spent time with participated in the creation of cultural spaces in their communities to transform the meanings and practice of art, politics, and activism , while redefining the contours of antiracist, antisexist, class conscious revolutionary struggle.

Hip-hop feminist ethnography created opportunities for women, especially to engage with questions of social location and identity from a translocal vantage point. The concept of transversality enabled us to situate our conversations about hip-hop within a larger context of traveling bodies and discourses about blackness and black womanhood. Furthermore, a transversal epistemological standpoint enabled us to productively interrogate how place, migration, and the search for personal, intellectual, political fulfillment could be actualized through conversations about hip-hop (broadly construed) and our life’s work as resistant hip-hop cultural practitioners. We opened some very important new questions for further research in the Middle East, and particularly Dubai. These questions include: Will hip-hop generation women be content with the lack of formal political representation in Arab states? Will “blackness” as a social and political identity remain a useful marker to call attention to patterns of racialized poverty, urban containment, and political disenfranchisement among new generations of people of color in the Arab world? Finally, how will blackened hip-hop generation Arab women incorporate their love and appreciation of hip-hop music and culture into their approaches to motherhood? While answers to these questions remain outside the purview of this chapter, they are well within the project of transversal feminist ethnography. These are the kinds of questions that will provide insight into the lives and perspectives of emerging generations of multinational, multiethnic black-identified women all over the world. This work will provide new ways of understanding the emergence and consolidation of cultural identities vis-à-vis cultural citizenship, as well as demonstrate how art itself can be a springboard into telling new stories about place, politics, and cultural resistance among diverse women in the Global North and South, including especially women in the Arab world.

Finally, this provides a glimpse into the cultural and social minefields that are produced by largely unacknowledged racial and cultural hierarchies that persist as a by-product of antiblack prejudice, US cultural imperialism , and race-based social inequities. Hip-hop continues to be a rich cultural space in which to articulate the paradoxical state of societies that claim to be colorblind , yet in both formal and informal ways, restrict the building of deep and abiding social relationships across racial and ethnic difference. As consumers and practices of global hip-hop in the academy, in studios and clubs, and in popular culture, new generations of young women are able to articulate deeply personal social grievances that arise in transnational family and society. Hip-hop provides a cultural space in which profoundly different women can in small, yet meaningful ways, make place and community in territories that deny us the rights of citizens and, as a result, full participation in the cultural landscapes of the places that we live our lives, but that we are never fully allowed to embrace as home.